The Two Noble Kinsmen is a Jacobean buddy tragedy framed by Medieval Romance and Classical mythology. Although director Tim Carroll's programme notes identify these traditions illuminatingly, his production doesn't illustrate them so well. Sourced from Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Shakespeare is believed to have written the play's formal settings and John Fletcher to have written the more naturalistic core. This meant the bard covered the Athenian background with Theseus the Duke, his wife Hippolyta and her stunning sister Emilia. Meanwhile, Fletcher tended the personal tragedy of Palamon and Arcite, who fall hopelessly in love with Emilia while banged up in jail.
But the two sides of the play are far from independent and the classical contexts define the naturalistic kernel.
Unfortunately, Carroll seems unable to reconcile the play's dualism - despite spirited performances from Jasper Britton and Will Keen as Palamon and Arcite. In the first place his production lacks a sense of surrounding spectacle. Whether it be solemn processions or voluble fanfares, some sort of larger theatrical device is needed to mark the play's period pageantry.
But Roger Butlin's design offers only a gigantic horse's skull atop a steal tower which turns and swoops about the stage. It functions as an inadequate prison cell, temple effigy and pagan maypole - while also acting as a memento mori. But it is a clunking mechanism unable to unite the play's public and private spheres.
Many of the actors therefore seem uncertain of their role in the production's schema and, for all Geraldine Alexander's technique as the Amazonian huntress Emilia, she might better have been played as a blushing icon from Medieval Romance. Britton and Keen's Palamon and Arcite salvage a crowd-pleasing double-act as the bickering buddies in arms. Britton is a vain, sarcastic, dreamer and Keen is a sanguine, dead-pan straight guy in whom anger and content amusingly wear the same stoical face. In one particularly successful scene they prepare to fight each other as though dressing for dinner. Their romantic asseverations are also nicely parodied by the insanity of Kate Fleetwood's feral jailer's daughter - pitifully besotted with Palamon. But for all these individual efforts there is too little sense of historical place or tragic occasion.
The Two Noble Kinsmen
